See no evil, hear no evil

Hundreds of thousands of flowers were laid and thousands of people attended memorials up and down the country. Women of all religions, or non-religious, donned hijabs for the first time in solidarity with their Muslim neighbours.

But it was not long before Stuff noticed a backlash emerging on social media. We read with anguish the broken-hearted words of Anjum Rahman, of the Islamic Women’s Council, in the days after the terror attack which left 51 Muslims dead or dying. ‘‘We warned you. We begged. We pleaded,’’ she wrote of attempts to get authorities to take action against the rise of the alt-Right.

And we thought of Taika Waititi’s confronting comment in 2018 that, while NZ was ‘‘the best place on the planet’’, it was also as ‘‘racist as f...’’

We saw TVNZ’s excellent That’s a Bit Racist documentary, which presented the results of a Harvard survey on unconscious bias. The survey of 400 Kiwis, shortly before the terror attacks, found 89 per cent of South Islanders favoured Pa¯ keha¯ over Ma¯ ori and 62 per cent of North Islanders did.

Stuff embarked on a project to find out what Being Kiwi might mean for people of all ethnicities and religions. How common is the experience of racism and discrimination? We asked individuals. Of 20 people of colour, approached at random in Auckland, 14 said they had been victims of racism, including false accusations of theft. One respondent described an incident in which a person said she would not return to a pharmacy as there were ‘‘no more white staff’’.

But there is a dearth of hard data. The police do not record hate crimes, despite pleas to do so from organisations including the Human Rights Commission, the Jewish Council, and Multicultural New Zealand.

Without data, ‘‘it’s really difficult to devise suitable strategies’’, chief commissioner Paul Hunt states bluntly.

The commission has gathered details of about 100 race and religious hate crimes between 2004 and 2012, ranging from murder and kidnapping to desecration of sacred sites. But it is far from comprehensive. In the UK, crimes motivated by hostility or prejudice against a person are recorded as hate crimes. Hate incidents, such as offensive name calling, are also monitored. Anti-Muslim hate crimes are recorded as a separate category.

Twitter posts are also monitored by the UK police looking for the emergence of online hate.

Anti-migrant sentiment has been rising in the UK and the US, in part fuelled by the rhetoric of their leaders. Some of this has likely spread to these shores but, without data on crimes or racist incidents, authorities are guessing.

After the March 15 attacks, our intelligence agencies were criticised for focusing on the risks of terrorism from possible Muslim extremists while paying scant attention to the alt-Right. Perhaps if we as a nation had been paying attention, surveying ethnic minorities, recording the ethnicity of victims of crime, and collecting hate crime data, the warning signs might have been picked up.

We call on the Government to act with urgency to address these failings so we can all understand what Being Kiwi truly means for everyone.